In automatic and semiautomatic weapons, especially military weapons of the type mentioned, a magazine can be used for automatic feed of successive cartridges to a chamber of the weapon, the ejection and feed of each round being effected by gas power or recoil energy. For this purpose, the magazine may be a flat elongated bolt-shaped structure having a mouth which can be clipped into a socket on the weapon stock or body and is provided with a spring for pressing the cartridges toward the weapon chamber. Generally such magazines or clips can be factory filled and in most instances are refillable by the users.
In conventional refilling operations, a succession of cartridges are fed one by one into the mouth and pressed downwardly by the fingers of the reloader until the magazine or clip is fully loaded.
There have also been proposed cartridge packages which contain a number of cartridges which can be fitted onto the mouth of the magazine or clip so that the entire stack of cartridges can be pressed into the magazine in a single simple operation.
One such package described in German patent document (Offenlegungsschrift) DE-OS No. 21 07 864 permits a reliable loading of a magazine or clip, even under environmentally difficult conditions, e.g. in the dark, and where the user may be under psychic strain, e.g. under battlefield conditions, providing a package which has channels guiding the opposite ends of the stack of cartridges into the magazine or clip and a funnel-shaped mouth facilitating application of the package to the mouth of the magazine or clip. Pressure upon the stack at its side remote from the seat on the magazine or clip entrains the cartridges into the latter.
In this construction, however, the seat is so formed that, although the funnel configuration snugly receives the magazine mouth, it is difficult to stack the packages. In other words, when a number of such packages is piled up, the enlarged mouth portions interfere with one another and prevent an orderly stack from being maintained.
More specifically, the funnel-shaped mouth at one end of the package bulged substantially symmetrically around the entire circumference of the mouth so that a stack of the packages with the funnel-shaped seats upon one another caused the stack to tilt and be unstable. If the funnel-shaped members were not stacked upon one another, the pile of packages had a stepped configuration and was again unstable. Practical use of the packages, which generally were stored and utilized in large number, was limited.